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News - October/November 2018

Striking entertainment complex completes in Seoul

MVRDV has completed construction on The Imprint, a new two-building art-entertainment complex close to Seoul’s Incheon Airport.

Part of the larger Paradise City complex, which comprises six buildings providing a full suite of entertainment and hotel attractions, the Imprint features a nightclub in one building and indoor theme park in the other.

The client required a design with no windows, yet one that still integrated with the other buildings in the complex. The design achieves this by projecting the façades of the surrounding buildings in the complex, which are ‘draped’ over the building forms and plazas like a shadow and ‘imprinted’ as a relief pattern onto the façades.

“By placing, as it were, surrounding buildings into the facades of our buildings and in the central plaza, we connect The Imprint with the neighbours. This ensures coherence. Paradise City is not a collection of individual objects such as Las Vegas, but a real city,” said Winy Maas, principal and co-founder of MVRDV.

To achieve the desired ‘imprint’ of the surrounding buildings, the façade of The Imprint is constructed of glass-fibre reinforced concrete panels. As many of the 3,869 panels are unique, the construction required moulds to be individually produced using MVRDV’s 3D modelling files from the design phase. Once installed, these panels were painted white in order to emphasise the relief in the design.